1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a parking pilot system, particularly to a parking pilot system and method, which can evaluate the environment and provide the driver with a pilot track to park in an intended position.
2. Description of the Related Art
During traffic-busy hours, a driver usually has to drive around and around to find a parking bay in a heavily crowded area. Sometimes, the driver finds none parking bay eventually. Sometimes, the driver has seen a parking bay, but he passes by and misses it with no chance to return to the parking bay. Sometimes, the driver has found a parking bay, but the inexperienced driver has to move his vehicle to and fro to see whether the parking bay can accommodate his vehicle; if the answer is no, he can only go away to find another parking bay. Those laborious and time-consuming parking activities repeat everywhere every day, which are likely to jam traffic or even cause traffic accidents. Moreover, if the driver is inexperienced or unskillful, the parking process may damage another vehicle or object, which is likely to cause a quarrel. Therefore, devising a method for easily parking is a worthy subject.
At present, the fundamental parking pilot system uses the frequencies of buzzing, which is generated by a distance sensor and an audio alert system, to indicate the driver of the distance between the barrier and the vehicle when the driver is reversing his vehicle. A better parking pilot system further uses a camera and a monitor to provide images for the driver when the driver is reversing his vehicle. However, an inexperienced driver is still hard to determine whether the parking area is sufficient to park his vehicle according to the abovementioned information. Further, limited by the detection range of the distance sensor, an unskillful driver is still hard to park his vehicle into an intended area or even causes a collision with an adjacent barrier.
There are some prior arts proposing auxiliary parking devices, which all use a rear camera to capture the images behind the vehicle to help the driver reverse his vehicle into a parking area, including Taiwan patents No. I265882, No. I230128, No. I229645, No. 533154, No. 518292, and No. 200706418. The abovementioned prior art can assist a driver in reversing his vehicle. However, the assistance will not start unless the driver has moved his vehicle to an initial position meeting the requirement of the auxiliary parking system. Thus, the driver has to move his vehicle to and fro to an initial position, which considerably reduces the value of the auxiliary parking systems. Therefore is desired a parking pilot system and method, which can determine the initial position for parking and then pilot a vehicle to park.
Accordingly, the present invention proposes a fast and precise parking pilot system and method, which can automatically evaluate whether a parking position is appropriate and pilot a driver to park well, whereby the driver neither relies on his experience to park nor wastes his time on incorrect estimations.